Massachusetts has modernized many aspects of its property laws and housing policy, but an outdated, arcane property law continues to put family-owned homes and land, including family farms, at risk.
When someone dies without a will, their property is often inherited jointly by multiple family members as “tenants in common.” This type of intergenerational transfer of property is especially common among lower-income households. The resulting legal arrangement, known as “heirs’ property,” gives each heir a fractional ownership share, but no one has exclusive rights to any specific part of the property.
Under Massachusetts law, any tenant in common, no matter how small their fractional interest and no matter when they acquired it, unilaterally can seek a forced sale of the property. For example, if just one heir who owns a 1% fractional interest in family-owned property sells their property share to an outside party — often a developer or land speculator — that buyer immediately can petition the court to force the sale of the entire property even if the other owners don’t want the property sold.
This court-ordered remedy, known as a “partition sale,” can displace longtime residents who have paid taxes, maintained the property and invested in keeping it in the family. Often, family-owned homes, farms and land are forcibly sold for below-market prices, erasing years of generational wealth along with any sentimental, cultural, or historic ties to the property or community. Sometimes those who are forced off their property also experience a severe reduction in their quality of housing.
This legal vulnerability impacts property owners in both rural and urban communities across Massachusetts. Real estate speculators are becoming more active in Massachusetts, and longtime residents are at risk of displacement as speculators target heirs’ property in neighborhoods and other places with rising real estate values.
Consider the story of a Wampanoag family on Martha’s Vineyard. The island has sustained the Wampanoag tribe for thousands of years. In addition to this ancestral history, members of the James family had owned several parcels of land on the island going back over 100 years. As the real estate market was heating up, a developer forced partition sales that enabled them to acquire two of the James family’s parcels well below market. The family lost its land, as well as the economic and heritage value it represented, with no legal right to stop the sale or obtain fair compensation.
In one case in 2010, the developer paid $93,000 for a parcel that is about three quarters of an acre, then combined it with another parcel and built a luxury home that sold in 2020 for $2.7 million with a $1 million profit. In the other case, the same developer in 2024 purchased a parcel just under an acre in size through a forced partition sale for a mere $20,000.
That’s not a typo. A 1-acre parcel on Martha’s Vineyard owned for generations by a Wampanoag family was forcibly sold in 2024 under the supervision of the Massachusetts Land Court for $20,000!
If the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA) had been law in Massachusetts, the developer probably never would have tried to use partition law to acquire the James family’s properties in the first instance because there is no indication that the developer was interested in paying market value. The UPHPA would bring three key protections to heirs’ property owners in Massachusetts, protections that in many cases would dissuade various actors from trying to use partition law to dispossess families of their property.
First, it provides families in a position the James family was in the right to buy out the fractional share of a co-owner who is seeking to have the entire property forcibly sold. Second, it encourages courts to keep property in the family, when possible, by weighing economic and non-economic factors such as family and cultural heritage and the potential loss of basic shelter. Third, when a sale does occur, the UPHPA requires an open-market sale conducted by a licensed real estate broker.
These sales often yield substantially higher prices than partition sales in Massachusetts typically yield because the Massachusetts Land Court typically uses a forced sale procedure that lacks most of the features of sales designed to yield market value prices.
The UPHPA has already been adopted by half the U.S. states in every region of the country, including Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, states that have 70% of the U.S. population. The law has been very successful in those states in preserving ownership of farms, land and homes among vulnerable households and in preventing the plundering of family generational wealth.
That’s why state lawmakers should pass H.1964 and S.1239, bills currently before the Legislature that would make the UPHPA the law in Massachusetts.
We stand with the advocates, lawmakers and community members in Massachusetts who are working to enhance the ability of families like the Jameses and every family in our state to retain their land and homes and to preserve their generational wealth. Let’s act now and pass the UPHPA.
Devin McCourty is a former New England Patriots defensive back, a three-time Super Bowl champion and a Players Coalition Task Force member.
